Sen. Rick Santorum Esq., MBA

Self Description

February 2006: "Rick Santorum has served in the United States Senate since January of 1995. During that time, he has served as a champion for Pennsylvanians either through his accomplishments in the United States Senate or through his leadership position as Republican Conference Chairman, the party's third-ranking leadership position in the Senate. The Senator has been elected to a third term as Republican Conference Chairman by his Republican colleagues. As Conference Chairman, Senator Santorum directs the communications operations of Senate Republicans and is a frequent party spokesman. He is the youngest member of the leadership and the first Pennsylvanian of such a prominent position since Senator Hugh Scott was Republican leader in the 1970s.

Senator Santorum was raised in Butler County, Pennsylvania and attended college at Penn State University. It was during his undergraduate career that he became actively involved in the political process as a campaign volunteer for the late Senator John Heinz. Senator Santorum received a B.A. in Political Science from Penn State in 1980 and went on to earn an M.B.A. in 1981 from the University of Pittsburgh. Later, he graduated with a J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 1990, at the age of 32, Senator Santorum was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and made his mark in Congress as a champion of government accountability and welfare reform."

Third-Party Descriptions

January 2006: But these cries for help fell on the deaf ears of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), the man designated by Senate GOP leadership to draft a lobbying reform bill. Santorum, in a tough reelection race, ranked fifth out of the 535 members of Congress in receipts from lobbyists and lawyers ($519,000 last year alone).

Articles and Resources

QUOTE: s Google a publisher? Or is Google simply a displayer of links? Are these two things the same?...An Australian high court has found Google liable for libelous content tying a man to organized crime. Of course, Google didn’t create the article that made the references, it simply provided a link to it within its search results.

QUOTE: When attacking a woman by questioning her sexual mores, there’s a smorgasbord of slurs, and you can take your rancid pick. Help me out here: where are the comparable nouns for men? What’s a male slut? A role model, in some cases. In others, a presidential candidate.

QUOTE: n the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish.

QUOTE: If the [Supreme] court meant what it said in Lawrence -- that states are barred from "making . . . private sexual conduct a crime" -- it will not take that long for laws criminalizing incest to go by the board as well. Impossible? That's what they used to say about normalizing homosexuality and legalizing same-sex marriage.

QUOTE: When top Republicans go around claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves, which economic authorities are they relying on? None, is the answer. These people's approach to government is to make economics up.

QUOTE: There's a principle here, that journalists should have the right to ferret out information they deem to be in the public interest, even if it's against the law for sources to provide that information. But to be equally candid, people--even including journalists--applaud the leaks they like and denounce the leaks they detest.

QUOTE: Nearly 5,000 children have no representation in the complicated and adversarial U.S. immigration system. These children's needs seemed undeniably compelling, and Sullivan decided to get involved...
But the increase of big-firm effort on asylum cases brings up a thorny question: Has their advocacy and dedication raised the bar on what's required to win asylum, making it more difficult for solos, small-firm lawyers, nonprofits, and others without deep pockets to succeed in these cases?

QUOTE: While most everybody agreed that Congress was being subverted by lawmakers' reliance on lobbyists for campaign cash, the proposals getting the most serious consideration yesterday were relatively minor: whether to ban lobbyist-paid lunches or a few million dollars' worth of privately funded congressional trips.

QUOTE: The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

QUOTE: ...the Senate passed the ban on the [partial birth] abortion procedure...Supporters of abortion rights say the ban the Senate passed this week is every bit as unconstitutional as the law thrown out by the Supreme Court. Abortion opponents reject that argument.